Critics of US
President Joe Biden’s plan to relieve the debt of millions of Americans with
federal student loans have made a considered choice to put their words in the
mouths of an imagined group of working-class and blue-collar voters, angry and
aggrieved at debt forgiveness for upper-income college graduates.
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For example, Texas Senator Ted Cruz said: “What
President Biden has, in effect, decided to do is to take from working-class
people, to take from truck drivers and construction workers right now,
thousands of dollars in taxes in order to redistribute it to college graduates
who have student loans.”
Now, as I noted over the weekend, this way of
thinking betrays an ignorance of working-class life in this country. To work as
a truck driver or a medical technician or a home inspector or any number of
other similar blue-collar jobs, you need training, licenses, certifications.
People go to school to meet these requirements. They apply for the same federal
student loans and take on the same debt as someone going to college. And many
of these Americans labor under the burden of that debt because of high costs
and lower-than-expected earnings. (To say nothing of those who attended
college, took on debt, but didn’t graduate.)
The idea that student loan relief is a handout to a
small minority of affluent college graduates is simply a myth.
But even if you put all this aside, there is also
the fact that these would-be spokesmen for working-class and blue-collar
Americans aren’t actually speaking for working-class and blue-collar Americans.
The polls, so far, make this clear.
The first poll since the plan was announced, from
Emerson College, shows broad approval from across the electorate. When asked
about loan forgiveness of up to $10,000 for borrowers making under $125,000 a
year — one of the key planks of Biden’s plan — 35 percent of respondents said
it was “just about the right amount of action.” This might not seem like much,
but then consider the 30 percent of respondents who said $10,000 worth of
relief was “not enough”. Presumably, this group will support the current plan
but wishes it would go even further — bringing the total number of supporters
to almost two-thirds of Americans. Just over a third of respondents, by
contrast, said that Biden’s plan went too far.
A second poll, conducted by YouGov for CBS News,
goes into more detail about the demographics of support for Biden’s plan.
Overall, 54 percent of Americans said that they approved of the Biden
administration canceling some student loan debt for certain borrowers, versus
46 percent who disapproved. Nearly 70 percent of all Americans 44 and younger
supported the policy, as well as 47 Americans of voters from 45 to 64. Only the
oldest Americans showed strong disapproval. What’s interesting as well is that
88 percent of black Americans, 68 percent of Hispanics, and 41 percent of whites
without a college degree approved of the plan.
This, I am certain, includes plenty of Americans
with working-class and blue-collar jobs.
When you consider who benefits from the president’s
plan, this support makes sense. According to the administration, close to 90
percent of affected borrowers earn $75,000 or less, they are disproportionately
young and black, and they include millions of people who work the kinds of jobs
that, for critics of debt relief, are supposed to entitle their views to
greater consideration.
There is a broader context for this support. The
student loan debt crisis has at least some of its origins in decisions made
during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to reduce state support for higher education
and induce Americans to take out loans so that they might have “skin in the
game”. This was part of a larger agenda to degrade the social infrastructure of
public life, as policymakers traded easy credit and access to cheap consumer
goods for high wages and a measure of economic security.
It is no coincidence that all of this took shape in
the wake of the civil rights movement, the fracturing of the New Deal coalition
and the end (for those who had enjoyed it) of the Fordist economic order of
male breadwinners and traditional families. Opposition to broad redistribution
on the basis of racial chauvinism dovetailed in a mutually reinforcing fashion
with opposition to redistribution as part of the basis for a new order of
shareholder dominance.
According to the administration, close to 90 percent of affected borrowers earn $75,000 or less, they are disproportionately young and black, and they include millions of people who work the kinds of jobs that, for critics of debt relief, are supposed to entitle their views to greater consideration.
The rise of the student loan, in other words, is
tied to this larger story of the transformation of the US political economy in
the last decades of the 20th century, a transformation that you can see, in
politics, with the suburban tax revolts of the 1970s and the rise of the
“welfare queen” as an object of ridicule and contempt in the 1980s.
As power moved away from workers to shareholders and
owners of capital, the losers in this great experiment were a majority of
ordinary Americans. And as is often the case in the history of capitalist
inequality in the US, black Americans bore much of the initial brunt of this
transformation.
Given who has been hit hardest by the destruction of
public goods in this country, it’s no surprise that young people, working
people and black people are among the groups most supportive of student loan
forgiveness. In the same way, it is no surprise that so many people on the
right and in the center of US politics are opposed to it, partisanship aside.
Even a debt relief policy as modest as Biden’s is a
sea change from the direction of US policymaking for the last 40 years. It is
not unlike president Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, another moderate and
limited program that nonetheless changed the health care landscape for the
better.
Neither is perfect, but both represent a challenge
to the political and economic order since Ronald Reagan — to austerity, to tax
cuts and to attempts to dismantle the welfare state for good. And for the
market fundamentalists among us, any challenge is one challenge too many.
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